Saturday, April 29, 2017

Putin Ready to Order a Tiananmen But Underlings Won’t Obey if They See a Real Alternative, Yakovenko Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, April 29 – Like most of
immediate entourage, Vladimir Putin views almost all problems in terms of his
own security and is quite prepared to drown the opposition in blood, Tiananmen
style, Igor Yakovenko says.But those he
would need to carry it out might refuse to act if they were to see a genuine
alternative leader they could rally around.

The Moscow commentator says that the
Putin regime has set the stage for this by two of its policies. On the one
hand, it has carried out a kind of negative selection for the top positions
thus alienating many of those below them. And on the other, it has blocked any
chance for leadership change by democratic means (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=59041C41A182E).

Both of these things strengthened
Putin’s hand initially but now they are costing him support because there is a
growing sense of “extreme injustice” throughout Russian society, especially
among the young and in the provinces – and that provides the basis for a
revolutionary challenge to Putin possibly even in this year.

The Kremlin leader, of course, will
immediately view any Maidan in Russia as a threat to himself and be quite
prepared to meet it with a Tiananmen-style crackdown, Yakovenko says. “The
question is how succession will such an attempt be.” Putin won’t be stopped by
“any amount of blood,” and there are those among the siloviki who will do his
bidding.

But that doesn’t answer the question
as to whether there will be sufficient numbers “ready to fulfill a criminal
order from the commander in chief.”The
answer depends “not only on the size of the crowds which the Kremlin criminal
will order to be shot but also on a number of other factors.”

Many senior and mid-level officers
share many of the feelings of the opposition. They are simply not as radically
different from it as Putin and his regime suppose.They too, Yakovenko says, share a sense that
Putin has committed injustices that they personally can’t and won’t approve of.

“But the main thing,” the
commentator continues, “is that they aren’t suicidal.” If they are ordered to
shoot at demonstrators, some of them will have to ask where they want to be not
only on that day but in the future.And
if they see a genuine alternative leader that they can rally around, they may
choose to go over to the anti-regime protesters.

That is the lesson of the last 25
years in Russia, he suggests.“We show
how before our eyes officers and bureaucrats took such a decision in 1991 and
1993” because they saw in Boris Yeltsin an alternative leader that they could
support in contrast to the others. That is especially the case because of how
Putin has treated some of his most loyal underlings.

But there is a problem: the Russian
opposition has not yet offered to their countrymen such a leader or provided
the kind of strategic vision that officials and the population would be
prepared to support against a broad crackdown by Putin, Yakovenko says. Indeed,
in all recent cases, the opposition has taken a tactical approach and left open
the issue of “what next?”

If the opposition changes, the Putin
regime could collapse and even do so bloodlessly as did Gorbachev’s in 1991.
But no one opposed to the Kremlin leader should have any illusionsthat he will go voluntarily until the
opposition consolidates around “either a boycott or around its own candidate.”